Cameras Recording Ground Zero Rebirth

August 18, 2002|By Rick Lyman The New York Times

Since late May three 35-mm movie cameras have been trained on Ground Zero from atop nearby buildings, each programmed to take a picture of the vast site every five minutes, night and day. By Sept. 11, they will be joined by three other cameras rigged to do the same.

They will all keep taking pictures -- 288 a day -- for at least the next seven years.

The planned result is an extraordinary historical record of the rebirth of the World Trade Center site, one that the effort's sponsors hope will be displayed continuously at a museum, perhaps even one that emerges on the site itself.

Each camera will produce roughly 790,000 images over seven years, but the resulting film presentation, which the producers would like to show in a room framed by six screens that would be in continuous use, would be about 20 minutes long, thanks to the time-lapse photography.

The project is the work of a Hollywood executive, an officer of a New York pharmaceutical company, a Wall Street money manager and several of their friends who have obtained the endorsement of the state, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the owners of the buildings now bedecked with their cameras, which are each encased in steel-reinforced wooden sheds about the size of a movie theater ticket booth.

"It would be so easy to miss this as it's happening," said David Solomon, the pharmaceutical executive and co-producer of the project, in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. "This whole process of healing and rebuilding and reconstructing is something that we might discover, 10 years from now, has kind of happened without our paying attention to it.

"But in retrospect, it may turn out to be as important as the actual events of Sept. 11."

Jim Whitaker, an executive vice president at Imagine Entertainment, the Hollywood production company, who is a co-producer of the film and its director, plans to shoot additional film with video cameras around the site to augment the time-lapse sequences with construction noise and other ambient sounds. He has also decided to undertake a parallel documentary in which he will interview, once each year, 10 New Yorkers whose lives were touched by the events of Sept. 11, chronicling their evolving attitudes.

But at its heart are the project's matrix of motion picture cameras, which will track the gradual rising of new shops, skyscrapers and a memorial on the cavernous site. With one frame per camera clicking away every five minutes, the finished film will look, when run through a projector at normal speed, like one of those eerie time-lapse films of a flower poking from the soil, spiraling upward and blooming.

"I want it to feel almost like a meditation," Whitaker said.

The filmmakers have received support from Gov. George E. Pataki; Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corp.; and John C. Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

"It would add immeasurably to a museum which we hope to build as part of the Memorial Park," Whitehead said. "It could be shown over and over for the millions of visitors from all over the world who we expect will visit that historic place."

Whitehead, as well as the filmmakers, stress that there is no firm commitment to include a museum in the redevelopment plans. "We'd love to be there," Solomon said. "But if that doesn't work, we will talk to other museums. And even if we can find no interest anywhere, we'll pack it up and ship it off to the Library of Congress. It'll be history, after all."

Whitaker, 34, was sitting in a colleague's office in Beverly Hills last week running a tape of some of the early film. "See the stone parapets running off from this camera?" he asked, pointing to limestone balustrades overlooking Ground Zero. "I picked this location so we'll be able to see the seasons pass, to watch the snow fall and cling to these ledges and then melt away."

As he spoke, jittery flares of rapid-motion activity could be seen in and around the near-vacant construction site below as clouds whizzed overhead, and the portentous shadows of unseen skyscrapers poked into the frame, grew, twisted and melted away at twilight.

"I was in New York last October to go to a friend's wedding, and I went down to Ground Zero," Whitaker said. "And I just thought that I had to find a way to convey to other people the emotion that I felt that day."

Nick Wood, 32, managing director of equity derivatives at Salomon Smith Barney, was the friend -- and former Georgetown University roommate -- whose wedding Whitaker was attending. "I got a call from him a few days later after he got back to Los Angeles, and he described this idea he had," Wood said. "I told him, yeah, we can do this. We can make this happen."

Wood, who previously worked as a fund-raiser for nonprofit groups, became the project's chief money chaser. The biggest contribution -- $400,000 -- came from the Aon Corp., an insurance brokerage that had offices in the World Trade Center and lost 176 workers on Sept. 11. Kodak donated the film and the processing costs.

All told, about $500,000 has been raised and, if budget projections are correct, an additional $400,000 will be needed before the film is completed in 2009. "I'm not worried," Whitaker said.

The $900,000 budget assumes that the project will last seven years, although that is just an estimate.